At a Town Hall Tuesday night, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) told the large crowd filling nearly every available seat in the Ukiah Valley Conference Center about a possible future for the Potter Valley Project that would remove the controversial dam, but preserve the water supply the Ukiah Valley has depended on for more than a century.

“As your congressman, I don’t have any authority to tell anyone what to do on this project,” said Huffman when one member of the audience said that the only way to preserve Ukiah as “the last remaining hub of jobs” in Mendocino County was to strengthen Scott Dam, which was created by the Potter Valley Project. Originally built to create electricity for Ukiah by diverting water from the Eel River more than 100 years ago, the hydroelectric facility soon became a crucial source of water for not only nearby Potter Valley, but for the entire Ukiah Valley and many more communities built up along the Russian River.

“Technically, this is a hydro-electric facility (owned by Pacific Gas and Electric), but the real value in this part of the world is water supply. A hundred years of using that water counts for something, and you can’t just pull the plug. So I firmly believe that any proposal to do that is not viable,” said Huffman, explaining that he predicted this situation a couple of years ago and began pulling “together a group of stakeholders in an ad-hoc process, because I thought that we really need to have everybody in a room together, talking through the technical issues and exploring whether maybe we can control the outcome of this, because there’s so much risk no matter what side you’re on.

“Anyone who thinks that it’s a slam dunk that you can get everything you want in this very uncertain situation is very mistaken,” Huffman continued, adding that “it might be possible” to both remove the dam, which is what many supporters of the Eel River watershed want, but also maintain some of the water diversions that feed the Russian River watershed.

“There’s some preliminary analysis that suggests … that you might be able to operate a ‘run of the river hydro-project’ to continue diversions and be able to meet the needs of water users,” Huffman said. “And if you can achieve that, what I’m calling a Two-Basin Solution, that could be something that attracts support from both basins (the Eel River and the Russian River watersheds), and maybe even both the state and federal governments. And then you might have something to take to the (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) and say, ‘Give us a license to operate this project in a new and different way,” given that PG&E recently announced that rather than trying to sell the facility, it intended to walk away from it.

“But the only way (this potential solution happens) is if first it checks out technically, and it’s going to be looked at very carefully because there’s going to be a lot of skepticism,” he said. “And then if it checks out, we will literally have to have everybody together, because that’s the only way something like that works. If it falls apart, if exploring that Two-Basin Solution comes off the rails, I really don’t know how this gets resolved. And I think there’s tremendous risks on all sides.”

Also at the Town Hall, Huffman was asked his opinion of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a newly elected congresswoman from New York, by one man in the audience who said he is a millennial very concerned about climate change, and that Ocasio-Cortez “gives me hope and a reason to watch the news again.”

Huffman began by admitting that he is much older than “AOC, as we call her,” as she is 29 and he turned 55 on Monday, and that there was definitely an energy shift when “she and some of her restless cohorts came to town. There’s an edginess to their approach, and they kind of get in your face,” he said, admitting that while it might be understandable for older and more experienced lawmakers to bristle at such behavior, he was fighting the urge. “I think she and her colleagues are a welcome wind of change, and I think we need to find a way to be on the same team.”

During his opening remarks, state Assemblymember Jim Wood announced that Huffman “had a birthday yesterday” and encouraged the crowd to sing him “Happy Birthday,” which the audience did. “I have a feeling I’m going to pay for that later,” Wood then joked. “Maybe for a while.”